Scaffolding and Differentiating First versus Last

Here is an example of how I taught Pamela to differentiate first versus last from a side view. Pamela has a difficult time deciding which animal is first or last and basically guesses! I tried demonstrating how the animal with its nose on the outside is first and its tail on the outside is last, but Pamela was still confused when I mixed up the animals and/or flipped them in the other direction.













At this point, I began thinking about how to scaffold this by simplifying the elements. I pushed together all the animals to make the penguin's beak and the beaver's tail more prominent. But, Pamela continued to be confused with successive trials.













My final step worked! I covered up all the animals with a placemat, leaving only the penguin's beak and the beaver's tail uncovered. The mat made it so obvious that Pamela had no trouble picking first and last. We did some trials with the placemat and she picked correct animals for first and last every time. Then, I tried some trials without the placement, and she clearly understood! I plan to spend one more week on this because I want to make sure she remembers this from day to day.

Glitch with "In Front Of" and "Behind": Week Six of Prepositions

This week I reviewed two prepositions Pamela already knows and introduced "How" questions like, "How is Almanzo?" followed by, "Almanzo is panicky." I also introduced using ", too" at the end of sentences. I thought Pamela understood "in front of" and "behind" very well, but uncovered a glitch. She recognizes it from a front-on perspective but gets confused when a few or all are side-to-side or from the back, such as in the bottom three pictures from the book, Farmer Boy. Rather than moving ahead in my review of prepositions, I plan to work on photographs of Beanie Babies from a side-to-side perspective and then from the back. Pamela needs to learn that the perspective is that of the character, not the viewer. It will be interesting to see if this is a theory of mind issue.

Presenting Prepositions: Week Five

I did not introduce any new syntax this week, but wanted to measure how well Pamela understands prepositions. I embedded her interests by taking pictures of Beanie Babies. With prepositional phrases, one can word several questions for the same sentence. For example, with the sentence, "The snail is on the lion," the following three questions can prompt it:


"Where is the snail?"
"On what is the snail?"
"What is on the lion?"

Pamela did a fantastic job this week! She answered all three variations correctly most of the time and could ask these kinds of questions too. Today, I gave her an extremely busy picture with twelve animals and accurately answered my questions nearly every time. Even better, she followed my lead and pulled out her stuffed animals when composing her own stories during the written narration.

We are lucky because Pamela has a huge vocabulary. Her main issue is not learning what words mean, but how to string them together with correct syntax. In talking to the folks over at Dubard, I gather that children take a long time to master prepositions because they must learn to read and pronounce the words, what they mean, different kinds of questions, and proper syntax. She only needs to work on the latter two of these four issues. Pamela has understood prepositions for years, and now she can use them in simple sentences and questions.

Mary's comment inspired me to outline the next six weeks of preposition work. And, after that, Pamela will get her first exposure to present tense verbs and then present progressive verbs, the final piece of syntax in Unit Two!

Presenting Prepositions: Weeks Three and Four

I thought Pamela loved the highway stories as an introduction to prepositions, but she flipped when I wrote stories about characters in There's a Wocket in My Pocket. I snapped pictures of pages from the book and put the digitized images in her speech therapy stories. In Week Three, I introduced the article the in both the subject and a prepositional phrase of a sentence. The following week, Pamela learned where the can go in questions. I sharpened our focus upon several prepositions: in, on, under, near, around, and between.

These stories pleased her so much, Pamela could hardly look at the pages until she recovered from her excitement. Doing speech therapy was easy because she was eager to practice syntax revolving around another favorite topic. Switching topics from one interest to another allowed her to generalize the syntax of prepositions. The spoonful of sugar approach is one of the secret ingredients to her success!

Presenting Prepositions: Weeks One and Two

We finished personal description stories in January and started introducing prepositional syntax in preparation for preposition round-up stories (page 15) last month.

For several weeks, we have been practicing the concept of prepositions in Pamela's speech therapy program (the association method). I chose to make it very practical by focusing upon highways. Highways? Yes, highways! Autistic children often develop unusual interests, and, right now, many of Pamela's conversations revolve around the different highways in our area. She knows more than one route to take to different towns and often asks us to take one highway to a city and take another highway on the trip home. She enjoys studying maps of our state to learn new connections. Her syntax was never quite right in these conversations about road trips. One way to get plenty (I mean PLENTY) of practice with prepositions is to teach the ones used most in her conversations. My favorite technique is practicing language through her most cherished (euphemism for perseverative) topics because we are guaranteed to have many opportunities to apply new syntax.

Pamela understands prepositions, so my goal the first week was to introduce the syntax of prepositions in sentences associated with map activities. The first day we talked about our town, and the next three days we covered different towns where relatives she has visited live. We ended the week with an imaginary road trip pictured below. I focused on prepositional phrases with proper nouns to avoid the need for articles like a, an, and the:
"at [street address]"
"on [street name]"
"in [city/county/state/country name]"
"near [another city/county/state/country name]"
"between [two cities/counties/states/countries]"
"near Interstate/United States Route/South Carolina Highway [number]"
"to [city/county/state/country name]"

To increase her enjoyment of the stories, I included maps and icons for all the kinds of major roads (interstate, routes, and highways). Pamela loved these therapy stories and enjoyed her introduction to prepositions. The second week we introduced where. Because Steve and I have the same pet peeve (ending questions and sentences with a preposition), I bit the bullet and introduced questions beginning with prepositions: "In what. . .", "On what. . .", "Near what. . .", "To what. . .", and "Between what. . ."

Pamela looked forward to speech therapy every day because it helped her learn to discuss one of her favorite topics. Incorporating an autistic person's interests is like that spoonful of sugar Mary Poppins sneaks into her medicine. And, this "sugar" causes no cavities and does not cost a dime!